Over the past decade, the sixty or so days a year on which a major geopolitical or macro shock landed carried close to sixty per cent of the FTSE 100’s equity premium. Of the senior executives asked last year, fewer than one in five reported a dedicated capability to see those days coming.
That gap is not an information problem. Directors are not short of headlines, data feeds or scenario decks. They are short of someone who will read the map, take a position, put a date on it, and still be there when it is tested.
We decline conflicts rather than manage them, we do not lobby, and every judgment we publish carries a date and a number. Everything else follows from those three rules.
Where we work
The chokepoint premium
Pricing the straits, canals and cables the global economy quietly depends on.
Somewhere in every portfolio there is a strait. It rarely appears on a risk register, but it is there: in the freight assumptions of a retailer, the feedstock of a chemicals business, the latency of a trading desk that has never thought about the seabed its packets cross.
Read the note→Most risk registers price dependence at zero.
Not because the danger is unknown, but because the wrong thing is being counted. A register records how much passes through a route. The loss comes from what it costs to send it another way, on the day the route shuts. That number is usually several times larger, and it is knowable now.
Dependence is not measured by transit volume. It is measured by the cost of the best alternative on the day the route closes, and by the unpredictability that arrives with it — a covenant written against an average has no defence against a variance. Priced that way, exposures filed under logistics, other turn out to be among the largest lines on the register.
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The cost of fixing a dependence rises at exactly the moment you need it fixed.
Alternative routes, berths, second sources and repair capacity can all be reserved today at prices that assume nothing will happen. They stop being available in the week that something does. And a dependence of any size is fixed by a programme rather than a memo, which is the other reason to start before it is urgent.
How we work: three rules, and everything else follows.
Conflicts are declined, not managed.
A large firm manages a conflict with an internal wall. We decline the second mandate. Where two parties want opposing answers to the same question, only one of them can have ours.
We do not lobby.
We read governments; we do not work them. A firm that sells access cannot also sell an honest assessment of the people it needs access to.
Every judgment dated and numbered.
A view with a date on it can be checked against events. So every note separates what the evidence supports from what cuts against it and what nobody has observed at all, and states the condition under which we would change our mind. We do not issue a single probability, because one number hides exactly that distinction and a committee handed one plans as though the third category did not exist. Where we are wrong we say so under the next number.
How the work is bought
Four forms, in the order clients usually need them.
A retained relationship with the board or the investment committee. One senior analyst, reachable, who knows the business before the crisis arrives rather than after it.
Each political dependence priced at the cost of its best alternative on the day it closes. Most registers understate this by a multiple, and the review says by how much.
Three futures, each with a trigger observable in public data within a week. A position that needs one of them to be true is a wager, and should be sized as one.
The judgment taken into the room and put to questions. One exposure, its triggers, and what would have to be true for the view to change, argued in front of the people who have to act on it. A written note answers the question asked; a briefing finds the ones nobody wrote down.
Who we are useful to
And, as often matters more, who we are not.
Global footprint, no in-house geopolitical function, and a board newly obliged to show oversight. Cannot justify a standing team; can justify a standing brief.
One market, one strait, one supplier, one licence. Must disclose a material risk without triggering the very consequence being disclosed. Needs judgment, not more data.
Buying or holding assets whose value rests on assumptions about the map. Wants the exposure priced before the committee votes, and one name accountable for the view.
Anyone wanting access to a minister, a favourable regulatory outcome, or a report that agrees with a decision already taken. We decline that work, and say why.
The record.
Every note is numbered and dated, so it can be checked against what happened next. A new one appears each week. Follow the feed if you want them as they publish; there is no mailing list and nothing to sign.
Why this firm exists.
Because the analysis a board can buy is rarely the analysis a board can act on, and almost none of it can be checked against what happened next.
Geopolitical risk has become a governance obligation. It arrived on the register faster than any method for managing it, so directors are now accountable for a class of exposure their organisation cannot yet price. The market answered with more information. That was never the shortage.
A large firm sells a practice: a methodology, a team, a deck. This work needs a person who has read the file, will commit to a view, and can be reached on the day it matters. That cannot be delegated, which is why we do not intend to scale it. What stands behind a judgment here is the record of judgments — numbered, dated, and revised in public when they were wrong. That is a slower thing to build than a biography, and a harder thing to fake.
Most analysis is undated, unnumbered and therefore unfalsifiable, which makes it comfortable to produce and useless to act on. A judgment with a date on it can be checked against what happened, and every note we publish carries the condition that would prove it wrong. That discipline is the product.
Narvik was an ordinary northern port until the map was contested. Then it was worth a battle.
Nothing about the harbour changed. What changed was the iron ore moving through it and the alternatives available to the people who needed it. Its value was always there; it was simply unpriced until the day it bound.
That is the whole method. Every business holds a dependence of the same kind, carried at zero on the register because it has never yet bound. We find it, price it, and say what to do about it while doing something is still cheap.
Tell us the decision you are facing.
We will tell you whether we are the right firm for it. If we are not, we will usually say who is.
Thank you. Your message is with the firm.
We answer every enquiry, usually within two working days. If the matter will not wait, write directly to enquiries@narvikstrategy.com.
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The terms on which this site is published. Reading it does not make you a client, and nothing on it is advice.
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This site is published by NARVIK LTD, a private company limited by shares registered in England and Wales under company number 17298860, whose registered office is 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA. The firm trades as Narvik Strategy.
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No advice, and no reliance
Nothing here is investment, legal, tax, accounting or regulatory advice, nor an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Reading a note creates no advisory relationship and no duty of care to you.
Every judgment is the firm’s view on the date given, and may be revised without notice. Notes are written to be tested against events; where we turn out to be wrong we say so in a later note rather than amending an earlier one.
Narvik Strategy does not carry on regulated activities and is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
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